1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an information processing terminal and a server for supporting quality improvement concerning a product manufacture in which it is possible to design a workflow in accordance with a cognitive thought process of user to extract or process data, display a graph, or analyze statistics in order to verify the quality improvement concerning the product manufacture.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, in a highly developed semiconductor fabrication process, since the number of fabrication steps has been increased and each process operation technology becomes more complex, a conventional analysis system is required for a considerable amount of time. In addition, it is required to be skilled in order to effectively use various analysis functions of the conventional analysis system. Accordingly, a technical know-how of the quality improvement is simply accumulated to an individual user but is not accumulated to the conventional analysis system. Knowledge of effectively using the various functions depends on the individual user.
Conventionally, a management system for managing information in accordance with the fabrication process and an information system for analyzing in accordance with the quality improvement by an engineer are separated from each other. In addition, in the information system, system functions are fractioned corresponding to a subjective analysis basis such as analysis of defect data, analysis of a yield, and a like. No system has yet been suggested for a workflow in accordance with an actual engineer's cognitive thought process regarding the quality improvement.
In order to overcome the above-described problems, Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2005-182635 discloses a technology to make a system for supporting an engineer to improve quality in accordance to the cognitive thought process of the engineer, so as to share analysis know-how with other engineers and effectively use an analysis result. This technology makes it possible to design workflows as analysis know-how of the engineers and design function menus to allow the engineers to conduct a drilldown analysis by a workflow design function and a repository function managing results of workflows and menus, so as to uniformly share the analysis know-how among the engineers.
However, in the technology described in the Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2005-182635, it is limited to a fixed condition to interface between different engines (for example, each engine extracts a different data type, or performs a different graph function). Alternatively, the analysis result is verified, and the engineer is required to partially operate the workflow. Thus, this technology cannot achieve an automated drilldown analysis. In addition, there are workflows which cannot be combined because of a requirement caused by a filter function between engines in the workflow.